Tiffany Cromwell's tips on training for your first 100km bike ride

Tiffany Cromwell in the Rapha Women's 100 kit (photo: @wmncyling)

Now that the weather is getting nicer we can turn our heads to fun summer events. One established event on the women’s cycling calendar is the Rapha Women’s 100 on September 14^th, where women all around the world cycle 100km.

You can ride as part of an organised group, with friends, or just on your own – on your local roads, through a challenging mountain range, or out to your favourite café stop. Wherever you ride, you will be part of a global celebration of women’s cycling.

While a few women may find this distance fairly standard and can ride around it quite comfortably, many of us may find it a challenge. Professional rider Tiffany Cromwell, of Canyon//SRAM shares her tips on how to prepare to cycle 100km.

Tiffany (centre) at the Women's Tour alongside Lizzie Deignan (in blue)

Tiffany Cromwell was in the UK recently to race in the Women’s Tour alongside Hannah and Alice Barnes. Racing in the limited edition Women’s 100 kit, the team celebrated Kasia Niewiadoma’s second place finish, behind Lizzie Deignan (Trek-Segafredo).

Here are Tiffany’s top tips for those tackling their first 100km-cycle ride

1. Build up gradually to the distance.

Don’t just think you can go out and do 100km without having done anything beforehand. Riding 100km is a long way for anyone, even for us. In our pre-season training they say you need to build the foundations before you can build the house. It’s about starting with a 20km- or 30km-ride, do a few of those, build up to 50km, 80km and then you know that you are ready to ride 100km.

2. Ride indoors if the weather is too bad

These days indoor turbo trainers are much more interactive and much more easier than in old-school days when you had to do turbo sessions for one, two or three hours staring at a brick wall.  Something like Zwift is an awesome platform. Even if you only have an hour, do an hour and challenge yourself with the sprint points and high intensity, because that’s also going to help build you up to take on 100km.

If it’s really bad weather all week, then sure a few turbo sessions are good to keep things ticking over and keep your muscles working and understanding that level of loading. Then when the weather gets good again you can do your longer rides out on the road.

3. Ride indoors if you don’t have time to ride outdoors

Cycling is more about consistency than being able to do these one-off long rides. Even if you have the chance to do two sessions a day, that would help build that endurance, say if you had an hour in the morning before work. Just get on the trainer, do an easy ride and then an hour after work and maybe stretch that to two hours, and add interval training in there as well. Because you are spending time on the bike and getting your muscles used to cycling and then you’re getting on the bike day after day, it’s a way to build up strength consistently.

4. Balance long rides with short high intensity sessions

You can do 100km quite aerobically but you can also get quite fit by doing short, high-intensity efforts as well. It’s about balancing things out. I don’t actually use the trainer so much but when I do use it it’s for short specific sessions of high intensity, and short recovery. It’s always a fantastic tool to use when you want that extra little edge for racing.

5. Fuel your body correctly

That is super important. When you are training, if you have never used gels or bars I’d say get your body used to those.

During the 100km-ride ideally I would have a piece of food for every thirty minutes on the ride. I’ll start eating thirty minutes to an hour into the ride and then every thirty minutes after that. Then I drink about a bottle every hour. If it’s hot then you definitely need to take on more liquids, and a mixture of water and electrolytes.

6. Dress appropriately

Check the weather. If you know it’s going to be a sunny day all day, great! Then you need just a jersey and shorts. But if the weather’s maybe changeable, or if you’re going into the mountains where perhaps the weather can change very quickly I always throw in either a vest [gilet] or a rain jacket, because having something that can cover your chest is really important. When you get to the top of the mountain and it’s a little bit colder then you have that vest [gilet] to put on for when you’re going back down again.

7. Don’t forget the coffee shops!

I’m all for stopping and finding a good coffee shop, and having a light lunch along the way and really enjoying the ride. Don’t have anything too heavy when you have a proper food stop or it can be a bit hard on your stomach.

Tiffany (right) with her Canyon-SRAM team-mates

8. Enjoy the ride

The best thing about cycling is really enjoying being outside, enjoying the scenery, riding with friends, and having a good little rest along the way.

If you are mentally prepared for the 100km ride, you will get through it.

Remember:

Check your bike is roadworthy and carry basic tools with you like a spare inner tube, tyre levers, pump and a multi-tool.

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Canyon's grand ideas for women-specific bikes

Canyon recently hosted an experience weekend at Mercedes Benz World, in which they showcased their 2018 range of bikes.

Experience day at Mercedes-Benz World

I wasn't able to make it to the event, but I hear it was well attended, and it was great to know that they had a good selection of women-specific WMN bikes as well as women racers from their professional teams.

On the mountain bike side was the 2016 European marathon mountain bike champion, Sally Bigham, whom I recently interviewed for Total Women's Cycling about keeping fit while pregnant, while Tiffany Cromwell was there representing the road riding side of things.

The bikes the women ride were on show, and Tiffany took us through the Canyon Ultimate WMN CF SLX bike that she races with in her Canyon Sram racing team  - which leads me on to the women-specific road bikes that they produce.

Sally Bigham and Tiffany Cromwell

People still ask the question - is a women-specific bike necessary? Steven Shand, who I spoke to from Shand bikes, an independent manufacturer based in Scotland, said that it's not so much women-specific bikes that are needed but more person specific bikes. After all, everyone comes in all shapes and sizes! And Canyon have recognised that too.

Unfortunately, mass producers of bikes can't individualise bike geometry to each and every customer. Shand, and other independent manufacturers can, if you are able to pay through the nose for it. So Canyon have done what seems to be the next best thing - by producing a wide range of sizes for women-specific bikes.

In designing geometry they took into account measurements obtained from 60,000 data entries from women's bike fittings when understanding women's body shapes, and therefore the best estimate of the average woman's body geometry. From that they have designed bikes that hopefully can fit comfortably for women of different sizes.

Many people will already know some of this, but the studies by Canyon confirmed what has been talked about already regarding women's geometry compared with men's:

Women are typically shorter and lighter than men. Women have shorter arms in relation to their torso than men do (on average 2cm shorter); we have narrower shoulders in relation to our torso, and there is more flexibility in the pelvis. Interestingly Canyon found from their studies that that women's leg length compared with the the rest of the body is not much longer than men's legs in relation to their bodies. It had generally been said that women had longer legs and shorter bodies compared with men.

In any case, for the same level of comfort between the genders, this is achieved by the same angle between the arm and the torso. Women therefore need a frame geometry that includes a  a shorter reach than the equivalent men's bike to achieve this same level of comfort, because of our shorter arms.

Women's (L) reach is shorter to get the same level as comfort as men's (R)

Bikes tend to me built using the average size as the reference and then working up the other sizes from there. However, a size M unisex would be too big for a woman, and in fact the average sized bike for a woman is XS. So that is the reference size and then other sizes are built from there. For shorter women there are also the 2XS and 3XS sizes, as well as S and M for taller women.

So the good news for women choosing a Canyon bike though, is that there is a wide range to choose from, depending on your size, the type of bike riding you're doing, your level, and your budget.

The Ultimate is for top end road racing. The likes of Tiffany Cromwell and Hannah Barnes will have bikes in this range. With a lower stack on the headset you get a Sport Pro geometry to put you in an optimum road racing position.

Ultimate WMN range

For those into cyclosportives and long rides there is the Endurace selection which has a Sport Geometry. The stack is slightly higher than in the Ultimate range to allow you to be slightly more upright, and give comfort for long distance rides.

Endurace WMN range

For off-road rides there is an adventure bike which also has a Sport Geometry, the Grail. Don't ask me if it's holy, I haven't tried it yet!

If you get the 2XS and 3XS sizes they can be fitted with smaller sized wheels - 650 wheels, instead of the standard 700 - to give the bike better bike handling, and to avoid that awkward overlap of your foot onto the front wheel when turning.

With smaller wheels also comes the need for bigger gears than what you get with a compact, to avoid you need to spinning so much more than with bigger wheels.


So the bikes with 650 wheels will have a semi-compact rather than compact chain set.

So in fact, there's quite a range to choose from among the Canyon range. Gone are the days when there'd be just one women-specific bike. We actually have a few to choose from within a range, which can only be a good thing at a time when more women are getting into cycling.

I haven't ridden a Canyon bike yet. Hopefully I will get to try one in due course. The people I know who have ridden them have been happy with their ride - whether it was on the road or in cyclo cross, so I guess that's a good sign already.

Full details of the women-specific bikes in the range are on the Canyon website.







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